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NASA Coverage For Juno Mission Arrival At Jupiter

The Juno spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter in 2016 to study the giant planet from an elliptical, polar orbit. Juno will repeatedly dive between the planet and its intense belts of charged particle radiation. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

June 29, 2016 – This Fourth of July, NASA’s solar-powered Juno spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter after an almost five-year journey. News briefings and live coverage will be held at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website.

On the evening of July 4, Juno will perform a suspenseful orbit insertion maneuver, a 35-minute burn of its main engine, to slow the spacecraft by about 1,212 mph (542 meters per second) so it can be captured into the gas giant’s orbit. Once in Jupiter’s orbit, the spacecraft will circle the Jovian world 37 times during 20 months, skimming to within 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) above the cloud tops. This is the first time a spacecraft will orbit the poles of Jupiter, providing new answers to ongoing mysteries about the planet’s core, composition and magnetic fields.

JPL manages the Juno mission for NASA. The mission’s principal investigator is Scott Bolton of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The mission is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft.